Night, Horses and the Desert

Here are two pieces from Night, Horses and the Desert, edited by Robert Irwin. The first is from 'The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn' (Goodman's translation) by "a secretive literary and scientific brotherhood based in Basra in the 10th and 11th centuries [c.e.] known as the Ikhwan al-Safa' or 'Brethren of Purity'." Only one paragraph of the excerpt really tells anything about the jinn; here it is:

The years went by, and Muhammad was sent, God bless and keep him and all his House. He called men and jinn to God and to Islam. One party of jinn answered his call and became good Muslims. In the course of time a king arose over the jinn, Biwarasp the Wise, known as King Heroic. The seat of his kingdom was an island called Balasaghun in the midst of the Green Sea, which lies near the equator. There the air and soil were good. There were sweet rivers, bubbling springs, ample fields, and sheltered resting places, varieties of trees and fruit, lush meadows, herbs, and flowers.

The second is from 'Risalat al Ghufran' ("Epistle of Forgiveness") by Abu al-'Ala al-Ma'arri. I include the whole excerpt and Irwin's commentary, since it has some cool info on the houris as well...

         When the guests departed, the Shaikh was left alone with two

         houris. Their exceeding beauty amazed him, and he was lavish of

         his compliments, but one of them burst into laughter, saying, ‘Do

         you know who I am, O Ibn Mansur? My name in the transitory

         world was Hamdun, and I lived at the Babu’l-Iraq in Aleppo. I

         worked a hand-mill, and was married to a seller of odds and ends,

         who divorced me on account of my ill-smelling breath. Being one

         of the ugliest women in Aleppo, I renounced worldly vanities and

         devoted myself to the service of God, and got a livelihood by spin-

         ning. Hence I am what you see.’ ‘And I,’ said the other, ‘am Taufiq

         al-Sauda. I was a servant in the Academy in Baghdad in the time of

         the Keeper Abu Mansur Muhammad b. ‘Ali, and I used to fetch

         books for the copyists.’

          After this the Shaikh, wishing to satisfy his curiosity concerning

         the creation of houris, was led by an angel to a tree called ‘The

         Tree of the Houris’, which was laden with every sort of fruit.

         ‘Take one of these fruits,’ said the guide, ‘and break it.’ And lo!

         there came forth therefrom a maiden with large black eyes, who

         informed the Shaikh that she had looked forward to this meeting

         four thousand years ere the beginning of the world..

          Now the Shaikh was fain to visit the people of the Fire, and to

         increase his thankfulness for the favour of God by regarding their

         state, in accordance with His saying (Kor., xxxvii, 49—55). So he

         mounted on one of the horses of Paradise and fared on. And after a

         space he beheld cities crowned with no lovely light, but full of

         catacombs and dark passes. This, an angel told him, was the

         garden of the ‘Ifrits who believed in Muhammad and are men-

         tioned in the Suratu’l-Ahkaf and in the Suratu’l-Jinn. And lo! there

         was an old man seated at the mouth of a cave. Him the Shaikh

         greeted and got a courteous answer. ‘I have come,’ said he, ‘seeking

         knowledge of Paradise and what may perchance exist among you

         of the poetry of the Marids.’ ‘Surely,’ said the greybeard, ‘you have

         hit upon one acquainted with the bottom of the matter, one like

         the moon of the halo, not like him who burns the skin by filling it

         with hot butter. Ask what you please.’

          ‘What is your name?’ ‘I am Khaishafudh, one of the Banu

         Sha’saban: we do not belong to the race of Iblis, but to the Jinn,

         who inhabited the earth before the children of Adam.’ Then the

         Shaikh said: ‘Inform me concerning the poetry of the Jinn: a writer

         known as al-Marzubani has collected a good deal of it.’ ‘All this is

         untrustworthy nonsense,’ rejoined the old man. ‘What do men

         know of poetry, save as cattle know about astronomy and the

         dimensions of the earth? They have only fifteen kinds of metre, and

         this number is seldom exceeded by the poets, whereas we have

         thousands that your littérateur never heard of’...

          Now the Shaikh’s enthusiasm for learning made him say to the

         old man, ‘Will you dictate to me some of this poetry? In the

         transitory world I occupied myself with amassing scholarship, and

         gained nothing by it except admittance to the great. From them,

         indeed, I gained pigeon’s milk in plenty, for I was pulling at a she-

         camel whose dugs were tied. . . What is your kunya, that I may

         honour you therewith?’ ‘Abu Hadrash,’ said he; ‘I have begotten of

         children what God willed.’ ‘O Abu Hadrash,’ cried the Shaikh,

         ‘how is it that you have white hair, while the folk of Paradise enjoy

         perpetual youth?’ ‘In the past world,’ said he, ‘we received the

         power of transformation, and one of us might, as he wished,

         become a speckled snake or a sparrow or a dove, but in the next

         world we are deprived of this faculty, while men are clothed in

         beautiful forms. Hence the saying, “Man has the gift of hila and

         the Jinn that of haula.” I have suffered evil from men, and they

         from me.’ Abu Hadrash then related how he struck a young girl

         with epilepsy, ‘and her friends gathered from every quarter and

         summoned magicians and physicians and lavished their delicacies,

         and left no charm untried, and the leeches plied her with

         medicines, but all the time I never budged. And when she died I

         sought out another, and so on like this, until God caused me to

         repent and refrain from sin, and to Him I render praise for ever.’

          Then the old man recited a poem describing his past life . .

        

                             R. A. Nicholson (trans.), Journal of

                         the Royal Asiatic Society (1900), pp. 692—6

COMMENTARY

                 

In what follows immediately after this passage, Abu Hadrash recites an autobiographical poem, discusses the language of the Jinn, and how in past times the Jinn used to eavesdrop on Heaven and were consequently punished by being pelted with blazing stars.

Houris are the maidens who await men in Paradise. They are so called because they are hur al-‘ayn, which means that the whites of their eyes completely surround and strongly contrast with the intense blackness of their irises. According to some authorities, their flesh is so transparent that, even when they are clothed in seventy silken robes, the marrow of their bones is visible. They are always virgin, no matter how often they sleep with men.

The ‘Academy’ in Baghdad must be the Bayt al-Hikma, a library and translation centre, which was established under ‘Abbasid patronage in the early ninth century. However, the implication that it was still in business in Ma’arri’s time is surprising. Taufiq must have been a black woman, as ‘al-Sauda’ indicates, but in Paradise she has been transformed into a white-skinned houri. Some women are born houris, and others achieve that state by virtuous living.

A precursor of the image of the Tree of Houris can be found in the writings of a fourth-century Syrian Church Father, St Ephraem, who wrote of vine stocks that in the afterlife would take to their virgin bosoms monks who had remained chaste on earth. The tree which grew human heads, or even whole human bodies, was an immensely popular image with Middle Eastern writers and artists. A popular location for this sort of tree was the distant and mythical island of Waqwaq. There, adventurous travellers were delighted to discover, sex grew on trees.

There are longer versions of the Risalat al-Ghufran than the one studied and translated by R. A. Nicholson. Not only that, but Nicholson produced a bowdlerized version. After the maiden drops off the tree, having been looking forward to meeting Ibn al-Qarih for four thousand years, Ibn al-Qarih prostrates himself on the ground and gives thanks to God for this blessing. He cannot help noticing, however, that the houri in question is a bit thin. No sooner has he had this thought than he looks again, and now he finds that she is excessively amply proportioned and has a bottom the size of a sand-dune. He prays to God to rectify the matter and it is done.

The Qur’anic sura referred to in Ma’arri s narrative is Sura 37, ‘The Rangers’.

Ifrits and Marids were ranks of powerful jinn. As is evident from Ma’arri’s account, the universe contains both malevolent jinn and virtuous Muslim jinn.

The old man’s merry boast, comparing himself to the aureole round the moon, but not to the man who fills skin with hot butter, loses rather a lot in translation. It depends on a pun on the word haqin, which means both ‘a man who suffers from urine retention’ and ‘a moon having its two extremities elevated and its back decumbent [i.e. lying down]’. Nicholson was a great Arabist, but I cannot guess why he has brought in the filler-of-skins-with-hot-butter at this point in his translation.

Banu Sha’saban means ‘Sons of Decrepitude’.

Muhammad ibn ‘Imran al-Marzubani (c. 910—94) was a well-known literary scholar in Baghdad. His Kitab aI-Ash’ar al-Jinn, or ‘Poems of the Jinn’, is listed in Ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist, but like so much else, it has not survived.

The kunya is that part of a person’s name which identifies him or her as being the parent of someone — Abu so-and-so or Umm so-and-so. (See the Introduction for more on personal names in Arabic.)

‘Man has the gift of hila and the Jinn that of haula.’ The meaning of this is not at all clear. Hila can mean ‘trick’ or ‘artifice’; haula can mean ‘marvel’, or, more likely here, ‘calamity’.